Jeremy Irons fronts Shakespeare Uncovered, insults Downton Abbey

Jeremy Irons was in one of those moods — the actors’ actor, an English wit of good breeding, erudite and educated in the ways of the world, but also a bit of an anarchist and troublemaker at heart.

He was holding court before a room full of plebeian journalists in Pasadena, Calif., earlier this month about what makes Shakespeare so erudite and sophisticated as a playwright, and how, nearly 450 years after Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Bard’s works continue to stand the test of time.

Irons, scarf casually tossed around his neck like Mr. Toad welcoming visitors to Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows, was there to talk up the six-part film series Shakespeare Uncovered, in which he hosts an hour dedicated to the plays Henry IV and Henry V.

Everything was going swimmingly until somebody — a Yank — unwisely and foolishly, sought to compare Shakespeare with Downton Abbey.

Irons leaned back in a room so quiet one could hear an ink-tipped quill drop, and then summoned forth, a mischievous look in his eye.

“What I’m excited about with Shakespeare Uncovered and The Hollow Crown series” — PBS and BBC’s ambitious plan to present four new feature-film versions of the continuous plays Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and Henry V, to air later this year — “is that you can see some of the best British actors playing Shakespeare, and what that can do to open up the huge TV audience to this gold dust. Show them, actually, that television doesn’t end with Downton Abbey. If you think Downton Abbey’s good, then watch these Shakespeare productions and you’ll see what real writing, real stories, what real characters about.”

Faster than a PBS publicist could cry “Don’t encourage him!” Irons was asked a followup.

“I don’t know your North American cars well enough,” Irons began, “but it’s like a Ford Fiesta. It will get you there and give you a good time. But an Aston Martin — that’s what you’ve got with Shakespeare.”

Wait, what, did Irons just liken Downton Abbey to a Ford Fiesta and Shakespeare to an Aston Martin?

“The trick is to speak (Shakespeare) as if it’s contemporary, and that’s what I try to do,” Irons continued. “It’s practice, practice, practice, I think, with Shakespeare. You can’t mutter your way through it in a sort of Downton Abbey way.”

Having just insulted Downton Abbey and the Ford Motor Company — or was it the other way around? — Irons turned his attention to the French.

English history and the play Henry V turn on the Battle of Agincourt, in which a vastly outnumbered group of English archers overcame a superior French army on Oct. 25, 1415, during the Hundred Years War.

The events of that day are a matter of historical record, but Irons’s version — intended to whip up his audience and show that Shakespeare is still relevant in the age of Survivor and Big Brother — was more colourful.

Irons may not have chosen to recite history quite the same way in public in, say, Quebec City or Montreal, but this was Los Angeles, where The Big Bang Theory is tops in the ratings and Shakespeare is just some old dude from the past with Benjamin Franklin hair and a Tommy Lee Jones goatee.

“The reason we won the Battle of Agincourt is because we had these amazing Welsh archers,” Irons began. “The French — I mean, you know the French. They are very classy, very stylish and all this. The way the French fought was that they wore amazing stuff and great armour and lovely horses, and they pranced around being gorgeous. They would capture one of their enemies, somebody else who looked gorgeous and who was obviously very wealthy, and they’d take them back. At the end of the battle, as in chess, the one who had the most pieces won, and then they’d sell these people back. You’d become very rich. It would swell your coffers because you would sell the Duke of Whatever back to his family for a huge amount of ransom. That’s how they fought.

“The English — well, you know the English — they tend to play very dirty. The English had these Welsh archers, and they killed people. They didn’t capture people and sell them back. They actually killed them. I can’t remember the actual figure, but it’s something like 30 tons of steel fell out of the sky during Agincourt.

“What’s interesting is that the French also had archers, but because they are the French, they didn’t like having your normal guy — your blacksmith, your farmer, your butcher — having arms, and so they kept them at the back of the field. They didn’t really use them because fighting was about looking good and prancing around on wonderful horses. That’s why we won Agincourt with much smaller numbers.”

Irons must not be planning any vacations to France soon, he was told.

“Why not?” he said, with a shrug and a dramatic flourish of his sweater and scarf. “As long as you can understand them, you can deal with them.”

Irons’s performance as Henry IV in The Hollow Crown will debut in the late fall.

As for his off-the-cuff comments about Downton Abbey, he admitted later, he was pulling people’s leg, as the English say.

“I’m a terrible television snob,” Irons said. “I don’t watch very much television. I’ve never seen Downton Abbey. So I don’t know what I’m talking about, basically, when it comes to that. I’m sure it’s splendid.”

Art is art, besides, and pop culture is pop culture. To anyone under 20, Irons admitted, he will forever be remembered as the voice of Scar from The Lion King.

“They say there are only eight stories in the world, and that every story is an adaptation of one those eight. But I’m not sure I would say to someone, ‘You’ve seen The Lion King, so don’t bother with Hamlet.’”

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
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And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile